The Impact of Global Electronics Consumption and E-Waste Trade

The global consumption of electronics and the trade of e-waste inextricably links First and Third World countries together through economic development and environmental degradation.

In our modern society, we have come to rely heavily on information technology and computers for everything from work and production, to information and entertainment. It is hard to imagine life without the electronic equipment that is characteristic of our way of life in the Western world.

However, the increased production of electronics has lead to a rapid growth in electronic waste which, when improperly disposed of, is associated with health risks and environmental pollution from toxic components like lead and mercury found in most computers and monitors.

According to the EPA, 47.4 million computers were ready for end-of-life management in 2009. In the U.S. alone, 315 million computers became obsolete between 1997 and 2004 and about 100,000 every day since. Only 25% of the products sold in 2009 were recovered for recycling.

Environmental impact of e-waste

The electronics industry is often perceived as safe and clean, when in reality the industry is one of the most polluting. As a result of free trade mechanisms and globalization, most of this industry is located in Asia, which has a comparative advantage for low-cost production of high-quality electronics, in large part due to extensive work-hours to increase output, along with low wages and lax environmental regulations.

Developing countries taking on the role of both producers and waste managers of the world’s electronics has had severe consequences for their environment and human health. Most industry in Asia is powered by coal, and large-scale industry causes extensive local air pollution in addition to being one of the greatest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions.

Further, with the increasing global legal and illegal trade of e-waste comes the concern that poor recycling techniques in developing countries, such as dumping, dismantling, and inappropriate shredding, will be incapable of preventing severe strain on ecosystems and people living near the main recycling areas.

Development impact of e-waste

In an attempt to further develop and achieve modernisation, fast-growing economies like China and India have embraced information technology, leading to an enormous growth in computer density. The growth in ownership of personal computers per capita in India was 604% between 1993 and 2000, compared to a world average of 181%.

As a result, the total PC base during this period has grown from an estimated 450,000 to 4,200,000.

While this has greatly contributed to India’s economic growth, creating benefits in the form of productivity, information flows, and connectivity, the addition to the total stream of e-waste has profound consequences for ecology and social welfare.

Transfer of e-waste

While it costs $20 to recycle a computer in the US, the same product can be sold for $4 in India, due to its valuable metal components. This works as a driver for a global market for e-waste, which in effect creates a massive transfer of hazardous waste products from rich nations to nations of the global South.

Low labor costs, lax environmental regulations, and the fact that it is legal in the US, despite international law to the contrary, to allow export of hazardous waste with no controls whatsoever, ensure that most global e-waste is transported to recycling facilities in Third World countries that often are plagued with environmental degradation from producing the very same objects.

However, both production and recycling is profitable, and contributes to economic growth that oftentimes is higher valued than environmental protection. In impoverished countries, it is hard to deny people poverty alleviation in order to protect the environment.

Jim Puckett (Basel Action Network) put it well when he said that global trade in e-waste is problematic, and that it “leaves the poorer peoples of the world with an untenable choice between poverty and poison.”

To address the problem of global trade in e-waste, the Basel Ban Convention prohibits hazardous waste exports from OECD countries to non-OECD. Unfortunately, there is still a large illegal market in which authorities are omitted by mislabeling e-waste as “metal scrap”.

In the European Union, a WEEE directive based on a market mechanism called Extended Producer Responsibility, seeks to deal with the increasing e-waste stream by incentivising manufacturers to design products that are easier to recycle. The use of market mechanisms to deal with the rapid growth in the consumption of electronics requires functioning markets and perfect information in order to be effective, a tall order for a global trade that is currently plagued with illegal exports and mislabeling of waste.

Conclusions

While computers and monitors are considered a necessity in developed societies, the waste stream generated from obsolete electronics is detrimental to both local ecosystems and the global environment. Policy decisions and market mechanisms designed to deal with the growth of this sector can help dealing with the associated consequences of e-waste, but it does nothing to address the root cause of the problem, namely, the growth itself.

About the author

Carl Frederik Kontny holds a bachelor degree in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of Bergen, with the final year completed as an exchange student to the University of Minnesota, U.S. While currently London-based, he is from Norway and has interned with Oslo-based environmental consultant firm, Xyntéo, analyzing how economies can decouple growth and emissions. While passionate about a range of environmentally related issues, Carl Frederik has a special interest in energy policy and ways to effectively integrate the value of natural, social, and human capital when measuring economic growth and prosperity.

There are no posts that fit this criteria.

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I'm familiar with Wasteland and with the arrests you mention.

The challenge is similar to any "prohibition" based reaction. The arrests are definitely real, but the laws broken were written in response to false descriptions of the trade. If marijuana is illegal, someone who sells marijuana has definitely broken the law. The question whether it was properly labelled "a narcotic" remains.

To stick with the analogy, I do business in Mexico (where I opened a Fair Trade Recycling sister company, which has been profiled in NPR Marketplace and Living on Earth, PBS and AP). The effects of the drug trade are horrific. But regulation, taxation, and legalization of marijuana is proposed as a remedy not as an excuse for the gang violence.

If you are interested, I can send detailed reports on, for example, the 2011 UNEP conference in Cairo on "ewaste" management. The group, including Katharina Kummer (Basel Secretary, who I deeply respect), met to investigate the CRT monitors which had been "dumped" there. If you follow the discussion closely, you will realize that the monitors were working, but that Mubarak's regime in 2007 passed a law against importing monitors more than 3 years after date of manufacture. It typically takes a year from the "assembled on" date for a CRT monitor to be sold at retail. They are built like battleships and last 20-25 years. My company stopped selling to Egypt after the law was put in place, and the quality of monitors went down as the demand - incredible demand for affordable display devices - continued. This is standard "prohibition" economics. The dictatorship was trying to stop affordable display devices from being sold, and people wanted to get online. The going price of the CRT monitors in Egypt was $12 at the port - but they only have about $2.75 worth of copper and plastic. So the UNEP report found that the "dump site" was at the port, where customs officials found monitors being "illegally imported". And there was an arrest of a USA company which (unlike mine) continued to ship to Egypt (replacing date codes). They were arrested for fraud (changing labels). The Seattle anti-globalization org ran photos of mixed ewaste in a pile (TVs etc., not in Egypt) and described it as a victory against e-waste crime.

CBS 60 Minutes did not find a single monitor in Guiyu. BAN.org admitted that when I asked during their presentation at the Interpol Summit in 2011.

Here is a slide show of 68 photos taken in Malaysia and China. The factories which purchase CRT monitors from Europe, USA, Australia, South Korea and Japan were contract manufacturers, like Foxconn (most of them owned by Proview or Wistron), which originally assembled the computer monitors on behalf of companies like IBM, HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. https://picasaweb.google.com/108266863784829595501/BigSecretMonitorFactoriesLegitimateReuseVsEWaste

So I wouldn't dispute that loads you describe were sent to Asia. What I dispute is the statistic that 80-90% of USA e-waste goes there, and the statistic that 80-90% of what is exported there winds up recycled in substandard environmental conditions. I'd recommend a blog, www.shanghaiscrap.com, if you want the opinion of a non-industry professional based in China who has visited some of the same sites (Adam Minter has a book on Recycling being printed, available in a couple of months).

Marijuana is not a narcotic, and most CRT recycling isn't "primitive" in Asia. Both have been made illegal, and the trade and standards for each have declined. War on reuse, planned obsolescence in hindsight,, call it what you will, but follow the money. See who funds the activist "watchdog". And ask for their source of the 80-90% statistic. Not only does it not exist, but their own numbers disprove themselves if you have any math skills.... 80% of goods exported X 80% primitive management =/ 80%, but the numbers are interchanged repeatedly in quote after quote.

There is an anti-globalisation groups which have really polluted the data out there. Most of the exports of CRT monitors to China, for example, were purchased by the original CRT monitor assembly factories for re-furbishment and resale to "good enough markets". Most of the junk filmed in Africa, India, China, etc. were originally generated or used in those countries (Africa had TV when I lived there in the 1980s).

A more balanced approach is Fair Trade Recycling, which refuses to boycott technicians of color. I'd be interested in your reaction to this op ed article I published in Motherboard in 2010.

Thanks for your comment! Based on your experience in the field I'm sure you know a lot about this, and I would be very interested in learning more about how the data are polluted by anti-globalisation groups. However, I still think this is not just a problem fabricated to work against globalisation; just today a man in Oslo was arrested for illegally sending 1074 tons of e-waste to China and Malaysia in the period 2007-2009. The article is in Norwegian I'm afraid, but I'll attach the link. Further, the documentary Wasteland was used in a lecture as an example of recycling collectors in the US guaranteeing that the waste was treated in the US, and it was still traced to end up in Asia. I would love to hear about your first-hand experiences and discuss this further, and thanks for sending the op-ed.